"There's the same quality about all of those things that I really like, that here-and-gone quality," she said.

So, earlier this summer she used the neighborhood intranet to invite the 300-plus families in the Erie Village development where she lives in Erie to celebrate on Aug. 23 the warm weather remains and to welcome folks to the porch of her Craftsman style home for lemonade and chocolate chip cookies.

When the weekend arrived, Spalding festooned her porch with lanterns she hand-decorated with decoupage, alcohol-based markers and fringe. Her fanciful designs included bees on a yellow lantern, bats on an orange lantern, pink peonies on a cream lantern and a Navajo blanket pattern on a white lantern.

A week earlier, she paid a teenager $100 to deliver Illumination Night fliers door to door and set a sandwich board sign by the roundabout at Erie Village's main entrance.

Still, Spalding wondered as night fell if her busy neighbors would catch the spirit of building community with light.

A holiday without a holiday

Turns out other neighbors wondered the same thing.

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"It was kind of retro and kind of unexpected," neighbor Bradley Beck, 55, said. "Nobody knew what would transpire. But it became a holiday without a holiday."

He and his wife lit lanterns, spun vinyl records by Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and offered cold beverages to passersby.

"We actually never got off our porch to see the rest of the neighborhood because people kept coming over to say, 'Hi,'" he said.

Sidewalk congestion eventually nudged neighbors into the streets where they could more freely walk dogs, ride bikes, pull wagons and push baby carriages while taking in the spectacle of porches aglow with lanterns.

Neighbor Meredith Lanning invited friends and family to dinner that night and out for a walk afterwards to check out the eye candy.

After the event, she said helping her kids get ready for it turned out to be almost as fun.

"Their favorite project was when I handed them each a small white paper lantern, acrylic paints and paint brushes and let them go to town," Lanning, 33, said.

An unlikely trendsetter

Spalding never considered herself a trendsetter, someone gifted in building community through an initiative.

Yet, with more than a third of her neighbors participating in the first Illumination Night, it appears that she is more than an illustrator.

She is a neighbor with a knack for stirring imagination off the page and on the porch in kids and adults.

Spalding credits her inspiration to the Grand Illumination event at the Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting Association, a non-profit religious organization and National Historic Landmark. The mostly seasonal island residents living there in cottages a block from the sea more than a century ago welcomed the Massachusetts governor by hanging Chinese and Japanese lanterns.

Something about the soft light, the creative expression and the evening parade of neighbors -- with or without a politician in tow -- convinced residents every August thereafter to celebrate the end of summer this way, according to the MVCMA website.

Spalding, who grew up in New Mexico, also drew inspiration from the southwestern tradition of lining sidewalks, driveways and rooflines with luminaria during the holidays.

"I always thought that was really moving, that a community would put on a spectacular visual event not just for themselves, but for others," she said.

Aspects of both longstanding traditions now exist in the new Erie Village tradition, where one porch displayed dozens of luminaria on the rails, steps and sidewalk, and another featured a single, tiny lantern hand-decorated with a wrap-around American flag.

"Even the smallest, most humble display helped tie this neighborhood together," Spalding said. "... It's great that you can spend $1.20 on a lantern, and then just embellish."

The Beck household during the Illumination Night event, which was the brainchild of Erie Village resident Michelle Spalding and was inspired by the Grand Illumination event at the Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting Association. (Photo courtesy of Bradley Beck / Longmont Times-Call)

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